Letters to
by onepiecehogwartsau
Summary: A short, three-part series of one-shots/drabbles around the theme of "Zoro's School Letters", and in which a raven Is Not Paid Enough For This Shit, a postal owl complains about Kids These Days and Minerva McGonagall is really, truly Done With This. (Part of our "Magical Revolution" series.)
1. The Letter to No-One

**The Letter to No One**

To most, the 16th of March, 1982, was a completely ordinary day. To some, however, it was a very special day, and a small, eight-year-old boy was one of them.

Even if he _was_ about to fall asleep out of sheer and utter boredom.

Really, he didn't know how good he had it. If _he'd_ been the one currently winging his way across the English Channel in pouring rain, he certainly wouldn't have complained about having to wait around in an office in order to sign some papers.

But as it was, he was, in fact, _not_ a raven flying across the English Channel in pouring rain, and so he did not properly appreciate his boredom; no, he was just happy that it would end soon.

For you see, today was the day Zoro Roronoa would become Zoro Roronoa Isshin and _officially_ move out of the orphanage he had been living in for the last two years and move in with his new _official_ guardian, Koshiro Isshin.

Note the " _officially"_ s; Zoro had already been acting as a son in the Isshin house anyway, so the papers were mostly just a formality as far as the two (and Koshiro's daughter, Kuina, who one should _never_ forget on pain of... _pain_ ) were concerned.

Considering that, perhaps it is understandable that the boy was quite a bit less excited than most young children would be in the same situation.

Still, he should have spared a thought for the poor raven, especially considering how he was just about to make things worse for the black-feathered fowl.

But it is seldom fair to blame a person for things that they could not possibly have been aware of, and as such we cannot think ill of the boy as he put his pen to paper, and, with seventeen letters in three words put to paper, completely severed the tenuous magical thread that the raven had followed all of the way from Japan in order to find the recipient of the letter clutched in his talons.

Confused, wet, cold, miserable and more than a little peeved, the raven resolutely dropped the now useless letter into the turbulent waters of the Channel and turned around to start making his way back to Japan.

He resolved to have _words_ with whatever idiot had addressed the letter.

For those curious: no, the principal of Mahoutokoro did not appreciate the painful pecks to her hands and the repeatedly crowed " _Inaaai, inai! Inai, baaaaaka!_ " in her ear.

* * *

 _Inai_ means "does not exist" and _baka_ means "idiot" in Japanese.


	2. The Letter to Someone

**The Letter to Someone**

The 17th of July, 1985, dawned bright and early, at least for a small, black-haired eleven-year-old who was out in his guardian's backyard, running through sword forms.

For the barn owl who had flown down from Scotland, however, it certainly seemed as if the 17th dawned _way too goddamn bright_ and _way to fuckin' late_.

Or it would have, you know, if owls could swear.

As it is, however, owls _cannot_ swear, so it'll have to suffice to say that the owl was not happy about the fact that the sun was blinding her and that humans were diurnal creatures.

Still, she was a well-bred and well-trained postal owl in the employ of one of the United Kingdom's oldest institutions, and as such, she _refused_ to take out her bad temper on the recipient of the letter she was carrying.

Even if the recipient was an ungrateful little _shit_ who neither thanked her nor gave her any water.

She resolved to make her return journey as slow as possible and do a pit-stop or three in some of the more plentiful forests along the way – her brother would be even more infuriating than usual if she returned in a temper, after all.


	3. The Letter to Somewhere

**The Letter to Somewhere**

On the 18th of July, 1988, Professor Minerva McGonagall decided that she had finally had enough. The owls bearing one Zoro Roronoa Isshin's start-of-term letters had been returning them to her for the last four days as they found themselves unable to deliver them, and with increasingly ridiculous addresses noted on them, to boot.

Now, if those ones had been accompanied by other students' letters, she would probably have suspected a malfunction in the charms that noted down the students' current addresses the first day, but as it was, it was _only_ Roronoa's letters which seemed to be led astray.

She had no idea how that was possible, quite frankly. It would be one thing if the charms had simply been worn down and lost power due to old age, but for one student to somehow confuse them like this while they were still in full working order... it was ridiculous! The charms were ancient magic backed up by runic arrays which seemed unnecessarily large, considering their fairly simple purpose. Ravenclaw and Slytherin had written them personally, for Merlin's sake! It had failsafes for its failsafes, and probably accounted for every single possibility conceivable!

Still, here she was, glowering at the array with Bathsheda and Albus next to her. Albus had conjured a table which was swiftly filling up with notes as they tried to figure out why it was producing ludicrous addresses such as "Big Rock in Forest Glade", "Dirt Road Going Up" and, the one that had finally made her storm into Albus' office: "Patch of Grass".

As far as they were able to tell, the charm should be noting down the student's home address. Should such a thing, for some reason, not exist, it should reroute the letter to their current place of residence, no matter if they considered it a home or not. Should that fail, the letter would be sent to their current location by way of longitude-latitude coordinates so that the owl could track their magical signature from there. And if _that_ for some reason didn't work, copies of the letter would be sent to the child's guardian(s) and/or close friends in the hopes that _they_ knew how to get a hold of the elusive student.

For some reason, Roronoa had managed to get all of those methods to fail, and it seemed like the array in desperation had turned to scribbling out nonsense.

Needless to say, Bathsheda was having a field day with this, and Albus wasn't much better.

"Now, now, Minerva, I'm sure we'll be able to figure something out."

"You don't understand, Minerva! This is _so well crafted_! It combines both the elder and younger futharks – do you have any idea of how much skill that takes? And not only have they made them coexist in the same array, but they've managed to intertwine the elder script with the younger script to create a self-propagating effect! _That shouldn't be possible._ It should by all rights destabilize and collapse, especially in a work of this scale, unless... ooh, that is _genius_! Absolutely genius!"

Minerva was wondering if she perhaps had spent too much time in her cat form lately, because _surely_ it couldn't be normal to want to hiss at people? She took off her glasses to pinch the bridge of her nose, suppressing the urge. She had never invested a great deal of time in the study of runes, tending more towards arithmancy in order to support and analyze more complex transfigurations, and she had to admit that she was a bit out of her depth here. Still, shouldn't they be focusing on finding a solution instead of simply admiring the Founders' work?

"Couldn't we force the array to write out his coordinates instead of this nonsense," she suggested, gesturing to the latest address they had had it write in order to observe it at work and see where things went wrong ("Field, Eurasian Continent"), "and then send it with an owl familiar with his magical signature?"

That immediately brought the two up short, and though they looked fairly disappointed (Bathsheda especially, and honestly, they could study this thing at any time, so couldn't it wait until the student had gotten his letter?), they both agreed that it was doable and likely to work.

Minerva immediately took the chance to walk off to the owlery to find an owl fitting their criteria, happy to let the two of them work it out on their own.

She had had quite enough of runes for the next long, _long_ , while.


End file.
